Too Far Afield

As a closed-source company, Apple can add features into software “simply” by licensing technology bits, thereby using cash (or proxies for cash) to resolve intellectual property issues (the inclusion of PDF features throughout the OS is a good example of that). Thunderbird’s licensing model means that sometimes we’ll need to work hard to resolve licensing issues, or even reimplement features at times.

David Ascher, leader of the new Thunderbird company code-named MailCo in his blog post Mail.app as competition or inspiration?.

We tried to print a PDF file at university yesterday. Unfortunately we had to rescale the PDF file from A3 to A4. To do so, we first needed the PDF in PostScript format. When we tried to convert the PDF to PostScript, we got this nice message:

1. bash-3.00$ pdf2ps /home/vw_7/oe/2007/Gremien/visio-gremienskizze-v2.pdf
2. **** Warning: Fonts with Subtype = /TrueType should be embedded.
3. But ArialMT is not embedded.
4. **** Warning: Fonts with Subtype = /TrueType should be embedded.
5. But Arial-BoldMT is not embedded.
7. **** This file had errors that were repaired or ignored.
8. **** The file was produced by:
9. **** >>>> Acrobat Distiller 7.0 (Windows) < <<<
10. **** Please notify the author of the software that produced this
11. **** file that it does not conform to Adobe's published PDF
12. **** specification.

Two options here: Either the message is wrong or Adobe does not eat it’s own dogfood. Don’t know, what applies as I’m by no means a PDF specification expert. The PostScript file ended up to be some 355 MB in size by the way. A bit much for the printer. So we decided to take the PNG version of the file and used GIMP to do the printing magic for us.

Thanks again J. for forwarding the warning message and of course for the good operator service!

Der in der freien Wirtschaft Tätige könne nicht nur ein halbes Wiesnhähnchen, sondern auch mindestens zwei Liter Bier konsumieren. Gemessen an diesem Maßstab habe der Vermieter besonders sparsam gehandelt, da neben dem Gutschein für das halbe Wiesnhähnchen nur ein Gutschein für einen Liter Bier überlassen wurde, befand der Münchner Richter.

Ein Herz für Hausmeister, Hamburger Abendblatt, 05.10.2007 (via Lawblog)

Out of the blue we get errors from a webalizer cron script on 3 of our web servers. This is strange, because we never used webalizer. We use a custom version of analog to generate web statistics. Wild speculations in the admin team right now.

Firefox’ session recovery feature comes in very handy at times. Imagine this: You need to restart Firefox, because you just changed some sound settings. One of the twenty web pages you have currently open is a very important one. Another common situation: You are in the middle of a research on ACM and you have difficulties managing all your 42 tabs with different academic papers and abstracts. Suddenly, your battery is almost empty and there is no place to plug in anywhere within walking distance. No need to bookmark. Just type pkill firefox and you’re all set. Isn’t this what you would call a real killer feature?

I have no idea who those three people are, I had never met them in my life. Yet while Flav, Ken and I were busy doing other stuff, people stumbled across this on launchpad and just fixed stuff up.

Jorge Castro in a post on Launchpad PPA and his intlclock packages for Ubuntu. And by the way: Try out Novell’s intlclock. It has a few issues, but if you work internationally, this is a killer clock. Note that Launchpad still is mostly closed source as of today.